What with bingo being so popular these days, the cash prizes on offer are greater than ever before. For example, some sites pay out more than $4,000,000 in prizes every single day, with some estimates saying that there’s 10 winners every second on online bingo. What with so much money at stake, serious players will need to play wisely to boost their chances of winning. With that in mind, we thought we’d take a look at Joseph E. Granville’s strategy for maximizing your chances of winning.

The strategy

Joseph E. Granville is one of the most famous names in bingo strategy. A successful stock market investor who created several strategies for buying and selling shares, he later turned his attention to bingo, in the hope of applying mathematical formulas to it to prove that there’s more to the game than just chance itself.

While most players believe bingo is just a game of chance with numbers drawn at random, Granville believed that it’s still possible to identify patters in the random numbers that are drawn. So, for example, in a game of 75-ball bingo, the probability of any number being drawn first is exactly 75/1, but after that the odds decrease exponentially with each ball that’s drawn out.

Keeping this in mind, Granville made a few observations as random numbers are pulled out:

There will be the same quantity of numbers ending in 1’s, 2’s, 3’s, 4’s and so on.

There will be a balance between the number of odd and even numbers picked.

There will be a balance between high and low numbers picked.

As such, Granville’s findings suggest that the most important aspect of any bingo game is the card selection. The law of probability suggests that there’s a strong tendency for a number ending in 1, then 2, then 3, to be called. As such, it’s better to play with cards that have the widest possible range of final digits on them to boost your chances of winning. So say M-21 is the first ball called, the chances of a second ball ending in number 1 have been reduced, because there are less available compared to those ending in other digits.

Granville’s research is a great source for bingo online, and it shows that the wider you spread the numbers across your bingo card, the more chance of winning you have. This strategy works the same at both brick and mortar, and online bingo venues. So, next time you play be sure to select your own numbers or card instead of choosing at random. Choose cards with the most varied spread of numbers, and be sure to play multiple cards as this boosts your chances further.